Succotash, The Comedy Soundcast Soundcast

Succotash Clips Epi124: Clippin' In The New Year

Succotash, the Comedy Soundcast Soundcast, was launched in 2011 with the idea of promoting comedy soundcasts in what was then a marketplace still trying to find its way. By featuring short clips of shows being produced by funny folks both known and unknown, we like to feel that we maybe had a little tiny, eeny weeny, itsy bitsy bit to do with helping to ignite the torch of soundcasts across the globe! (But then we've always had a rather high opinion of ourselves...)

Original show host and executive producer Marc Hershon, along with booth announcer Bill Heywatt, engineer/producer Joe Paulino, associate producer Tyson Saner, musical director Scott Carvey, and booth assistant Kenny Durgis have kept the flame alive o'er these many years. In 2018, Hershon abandoned the host chair and anointed Saner to the position, with nary a notice from the legions of listeners. Typical.

Happy New Year! It IS me, Marc
Hershon, your host and New Year’s baby for 2016. And this is
Succotash, The Comedy Podcast Podcast. It’s the first
edition of Succotash Clips for this new year, and we have
a fine passel of clippage for you.

Before we
get into the nit and the grit of what’s in store this time around,
I thought I’d check in to see how many of you Succotashians are
also Resolutionaries. You know, those folk who steadfastly trot out
a litany of resolutions for the new year. New leaves that they are
bound and determined to turn over this time for sure, only to
almost immediately start backsliding furiously on their
self-commitments.

I tend to go pretty low key and
achievable with the resolutionary action, mostly because I know,
after being around as long as I have, I’ve got a pretty good idea
how low to set the bar in order to clear it.

My first resolution is one I’ve
been kicking off the past ten years or so with, and that’s to go
without regular coffee or any other form of caffeine for one month.
I LOVE coffee – its aroma, its flavor and its effects. But I know
it’s not all good in term of the way you feel if you miss your
morning cup so I’ve taken this step to purge my system of caffeine
and its residual cravings for 31 days. Achievable!

The other one is exercise. I’m
actually pretty good with this one, to the point that this is
actually a resolution to continue my exercise regimen, not jump
start it. To help out, I’ve signed up for a 10K race in April, so I
just need to press a little harder and I should be ready for
that. Achievable!

Regarding Succotash,
well, I’m just going to shoot for bigger and better this
year.

I’ve arranged with our friend
Shawn Merek to put on the first LIVE epi of
Succotash just one month from now. That’s right. Friday
night, February 5th, at 6 PM at the Improv Lab on Melrose Avenue in
Hollywood. I’m still firming up the details and will have more
information for you shortly, but we’ll have some amazing guests and
a lot of fun that night.

But we’re also aiming to have a
lot of fun right NOW. We've got clippage from the Hobcast
with Hob the Troll, How To Be Amazing, The
Mike Jolitz Show, The New Hollywood Podcast, The
Potato Bureau, River City Rant, Royal &
Doodall, The Cure, and
Victrola!

We, of course, will be looking
into the Tweetsack for your tweets and emails. But no Burst O’
Durst this time around. Our friend Will Durst has been off,
touring the Bay Area with his Big Fat Year-End Kiss-Off Show. If
you need your Fix O' Durst, please visit his website at
http://WillDurst.com or check out his tweets @WillDurst on Twitter.
(And the Burst will be back next episode!)

The
Clips

How To Be
AmazingWe’ve
clipped podcasts featuring Michael Ian Black as a
host before – like Mike And Tom Eats Snacks and
TOPICS. But he’s had a new one out for the past year
called How To Be Amazing, where his guests are mostly
authors and he picks there brains about their backgrounds, their
careers, and how they do what they do so well. I just reviewed his
recent two-part interview with author David
Sedaris for Huffington Post this past week. Very
entertaining and enlightening interview, so I thought we’d pull a
nice clip out of it.

The New
Hollywood PodcastI’ve got a clip from The New Hollywood
podcast, hosted by friend-of-Succotash Brian
Flaherty. Brian’s been getting some great guests on his
show and most recently he chatted it up with Paula
Pell, a very funny writer who’s been on-staff at
SNL since 1995, produced and wrote on 30 Rock,
wrote the screenplay Sisters, which Tina
Fey and Amy Poehler starred in, and on
and on. In the clip we're featuring, she relates to Brian what her
first few days moving out to Los Angeles was like. I’m kinda
surprised she survived.

Victrola!Another podcast I recently reviewed was
Victrola!, which is the namesake of a plucky little troupe
from Austin’s Coldtowne Theater. They rolled out a first eight
episodes of their monthly show in 2015, and they promise to return
for a second season. The shows are all written by and starring
Michael Jastroch, Bob McNichol,
Bryan Roberts, Lance Gilstrap,
Cortnie Jones and Jericho Thorp.
In December, they’d dropped a compilation show, with sketches from
the first eight epis, and here’s one of them — a riff on
Jurassic World.

The
CureOur next
clip was sent in using our direct upload link at
http://hightail.com/u/Succotash by Terrell,
one-half of the crew at The Cure podcast. He writes:
Hey, Thanks for Following @Thecurepodcast on Twitter. We decide
to use your service and we already have a intro. However its not
3-5 min long. Its about 2 min hopefully this would suffice. If not
we will create another intro next week. Thanks, Terrell I DM’d
him back to let him know that we’re not that keen on playing
packaged promos and that we prefer straight up clips, but after
listening to what he sent in on behalf of his co-host,
Marcus, and himself, I think this works just
fine.

Royal
& DoodallIf you felt a disturbance in The Force the past
couple of weeks, that wasn’t the new Star Wars movie
opening, it was the return of the Royal & Doodall podcast.
After some time away from the mics, Tommy Royal
and Angus Doodall are back. Where have they been?
What have they been doing? Well, you’ll have to download and
subscribe to their podcast for the intimate details but here’s a
snippet of R&D banter to give you a taste.

HobcastWe haven’t chatted up our friend Hob The
Troll lately, the purveyor of The Hobcast. But I
do chat with him every so often on Twitter and occasionally on
Facebook. That’s how I know about his recent Christmas special. The
Hobcast has been a little…off-schedule during 2015, but Hob got it
together enough to produce a fun little holiday episode where he
placed phone calls to some folks. Some of those people apparently
donated money for the opportunity to hear from Hob but this clip
doesn’t come from one of those calls…

River
City RantUploading clips directly to us is not the only
way for comedy podcasters to get their stuff on the show, of
course. I harvest a bunch of clips myself, our Associate Producer
Tyson Saner is busy slicing and dicing clips as
well, and you can also email a 3-5 minute MP3 clip into our
Tweetsack at marc@SuccotashShow.com. That’s
what they did over at the River City Rant podcast and, to
prove it, here’s the letter that came with the clip: “Marc, I
heard you on Dave's Comedy-a-go-go podcast and you were a great
guest. I think your podcast idea is such a unique idea and really
helpful to helping others weave thru all that's out there. Our
Podcast "River City Rant" is dubbed an irresponsible comedy podcast
where we simply just rip on anything and everything, one of our
favorite segments we do is called Worst Characters, where two of us
throw out voices in an improv format. I hope you enjoy and use this
clip as we feel it's one of our best. Thank you, Britt
Crumley, River City Recordings Radio, Jacksonville,
Florida” Thank you, Britt. Without further ado, here’s a
sampling of River City Rant.

The
Potato BureauOnce upon a time there was a show out of
Sacramento, California, called the Van Full of Candy
podcast. Fresh episodes stopped showing up in the early months of
last year but the guys connected to it – a bunch of sketch and
improv performers – have branched out in new and different ways AND
other podcasts. We featured a clip from STAB! back in the
fall and now here’s a clip from another show called the Potato
Bureau. Fun concept – let me read from their iTunes
description: The Potato Bureau is a musically-inspired
improv podcast, recorded live at the Sacramento Comedy Spot. Every
show features a local musician or group performing on stage for the
audience. They give the Bureau a few songs and stories, and the
Bureau uses those nuggets of inspiration to take you on a
(sometimes crazy) audible journey. The cast of the Potato
Bureau is Corky McDonnell, Zach Coles, Tina
Jett, Eric Barger, Michell Petro, Molly Doan, and
Court Hansen. Here’s a sample of what they sound
like in action…

The
Mike Jolitz ShowWhen I guest on other podcasts, like
Dave Nelson’s Comedy A-Go-Go show, I
often talk about how one of the shining benefits of the medium of
podcasting is that the barrier of entry is so low that pretty much
anyone can do it. You just need a mic, something to record with, a
smattering of knowledge how to get what you record online, and an
idea for the show. A lot of the shows we clip are hosted by
comedians or other well-known entertainers and it’s clear some of
those production budgets are decently sized. I was recently DM’ing
with Mike Jolitz on Twitter and he’s a one-man
operation, that podcasting-from-the-kitchen-table model. I’m not
sure what the size of his listenership is yet and he’s still
feeling his way into his sound. So I thought we’d give him a shout
out and play a clip from The Mike Jolitz Show. Here he is,
giving his take on the news…

That’s going to do it for Epi124
of Succotash Clips. Thanks for listening, or whatever it is you
might do while I’m talking and playing clips. Fingers crossed that
upcoming Epi 125 is a Succotash Chats show and my guest
will hopefully be Michael Ian Black. We’ve never
met but we both wrote movies identically titled Wedding
Daze. He directed his and mine was on TV, and they both
currently have 5.7 stars on IMDB. We’ll talk about that and more so
be sure to pass the Succotash!